Not Sophie with a 'p-h', Sophie with a 'PhD' (one day)

Month: June 2017

PhD Day(s) was a pretty useful experience, and surprisingly enjoyable despite the usual pre-presentation nerves. All students do a 20 minute presentation to other students, PIs and anyone else who’s been roped in to attend. It’s all about your project, your results and your future plans. Once again… I was data-light but it was useful to go through things to get a clear plan for where my project is headed.

It was similar to the Tissue Repair away day back in May only for the whole Centre for Regenerative Medicine building this time. So many students were presenting, at different stages, with different backgrounds and topics. Seeing the breadth of research that goes on at the SCRM was really inspiring and gave me lots of ideas I might be able to incorporate into my own work.

One of the things I’m keen to improve on is my ability to handle questions at the end of the presentations. I know this comes with time, experience and confidence in the work you’re doing but as it’s the part I get more flustered on, I always dread it. Others deftly navigate the Q&A and even get a nice discussion out of it… one day I hope that’s what I can do.

As my supervisor has said to me… if we could do it all straight away there would be no point in doing a PhD!

Wedding was the best day ever. Would definitely recommend getting married! But overlapping the final stages of wedding planning with the beginning stages of a PhD is something I would discourage as it’s been… somewhat hectic. Thanks to my now-husband for being an awesome support through it all. I would say compartmentalising works but I needed someone around to pick up the slack!

Back in the lab now and really trying to crack on with the work. We’re trying to get revisions for a paper done so it’s all hands to the pump. Luckily all the techniques will be used in my project so it’s perfect training and has massively accelerated my learning compared to if I’d been finding my feet in my ow project. Plus, if all goes well I could get my name on a paper in the first year of my PhD!